Commemoration of the end of the Second World War in Europe 80 years ago

Speech by the Lord Mayor Dr. Thomas Nitzsche

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Welcome to our commemorative event to mark the day of liberation from National Socialist tyranny and the end of the Second World War in Europe. Eighty years ago today, this special event finally brought peace to Germany and Europe and the final end of the National Socialist regime.

Eighty years later, we live in a world in which the memory of the unimaginable horrors of this war seems to be gradually fading. There are hardly any contemporary witnesses left among us to remind us that what happened back then must not be allowed to happen again.

Instead, in everyday politics, we struggle with the trivialization of National Socialist crimes and a resurgence of anti-Semitism on a scale that most of us here could never have imagined.

In addition, the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine has been raging for three and a half years now. The security architecture of the Western world that has existed for decades has begun to totter. Insecurity is spreading and is being exacerbated by the pressure on our society to change and adapt to climate change and economic stagnation, which many find almost unbearable.

But instead of seeking a solution through international cooperation, for which peace is always the first prerequisite, many currently seem to be pinning their hopes on nationalism and isolationism - exactly the opposite of what the lessons of the terrible armed conflicts in the first half of the 20th century should be.

May 8, 1945 was the day of the German surrender, the day on which the war and the National Socialist dictatorship in Germany came to an end. The guns fell silent for good on the European theater of war. Jena had already been liberated four weeks earlier, when on April 12 and 13, 1945, US troops came from the west along Johannisstrasse and occupied the city from the east.

In the six years of war, an estimated 55 million people had lost their lives. Cities and regions were destroyed to an almost unimaginable extent. Everyone has images of Berlin or Dresden, Warsaw or Kaliningrad, Coventry or Manchester, Volgograd or Leningrad in their minds.

The Soviet Union had by far the most victims with around 24 million people (almost 10 million soldiers and around 14 million civilian victims). These are almost unimaginable numbers, more people than live in the new German states and Berlin combined.

Ukraine, as part of the Soviet Union, suffered by far the greatest blood toll: at least eight million war victims, including over five million civilians, women and children who were murdered by the SS or the Wehrmacht in the German war of extermination.

These terrible figures also include 1.6 million Jews who were killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust on the territory of Ukraine.

The war also took place in Jena. Shortly before the war began on September 1, 1939, almost 2,200 Jena citizens joined the Wehrmacht and the Reich Labor Service. The first obituaries for fallen soldiers soon appeared in the newspapers, some carried by the grief of loss, others by National Socialist phrases.

The number of war dead rose significantly after the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. It is not known how many Jena residents lost their lives as members of the Wehrmacht, the Waffen SS and police or the infamous Police Battalion 311. There were probably over 2,000 people.

Jena's civilian population increased considerably during the war years, initially due to the influx of workers, later due to bombed-out families and refugees seeking refuge in the city.

More than 100 Jena citizens became victims of the Shoah by being deported to the extermination camps in the East or by ending their own lives to escape this fate.

At least 60 people died as a result of the "T4" murder program, under which mentally ill or supposedly ill and disabled people were taken to the killing centre in Pirna-Sonnenstein.

As an industrial location, Jena was also targeted by the Allies. During the bombing war from 1943 to 1945, Jena's city center was hit hard several times. In total, almost 800 people died, including more than 100 forced laborers and prisoners of war.

On April 11, 1945, the SS drove more than 4,000 prisoners from the Buchenwald concentration camp on a death march through Jena. At least two dozen people died here in the city.

Last but not least, the war in Jena was made visible by the more than 14,000 forced laborers who had to work here for around 320 employers.

It is no coincidence that we have gathered here today at the memorial stele, which has commemorated the Jena camp system during the National Socialist era since 2014. I am very pleased to welcome Dr. Marc Bartuschka to this place. Marc Bartuschka studied history in Jena, where he also completed his doctorate.

His main areas of research were and still are the Weimar Republic and the Nazi era. He has also devoted himself in particular to the reappraisal of forced labor in Jena and will be speaking to us on this subject.

Dear Mr. Bartuschka, you are very welcome!

Jena's involvement at that time and the responsibility that derives from it becomes clear when we look at what actually happened here in our city, on our doorstep, in our street or our neighborhood.

Nazi crimes were also committed in Jena or could be put into practice with the help of Jena experts, scientists, administrative staff and others. Jena citizens as well as people from other cities and countries became victims here.

Many Jena citizens looked the other way or accepted the visible crimes.

It is not a question of judging at this point. None of us knows for sure how we would have behaved in this situation. Instead, taking a closer look always raises the important question of how these crimes could have happened and been allowed to happen. How and why did the people of Jena behave as they did?

And this leads directly to the question: How do we deal with the threats to our liberal democracy and guaranteed human and civil rights today? How can we encourage young and old alike to preserve the humanist values of our democratic society?

Ladies and gentlemen,

In Germany, and thus also in Jena, it took time to fully understand the meaning and significance of May 8, 1945 as the day of Germany's surrender. The guilt and shame of being partly responsible for genocide and the horror of war and dictatorship, even if it was through passivity and looking the other way, was too deep-seated.

Liberation from National Socialist tyranny, which took place with the collapse of the Nazi regime in the spring of 1945, cannot be equated with liberation from National Socialist ideas. This confrontation remains an ongoing task for us today and in the future.

The fight against inhuman values, against anti-Semitism, against racism and discrimination and for our democracy is an ongoing process. We democrats must stand up for the fundamental values of our society and the dignity of every human being.

Thank you for coming and I would now like to hand over to Dr. Marc Bartuschka.

Speech by Dr. Marc Bartuschka

It is now 80 years since the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany - more than enough time for large sections of the population to have come to realize that this really was a liberation. This is a realization that many Germans initially struggled with, and which is still being questioned today by some on the right. Even if Richard von Weizäcker's words in 1985 were still perceived as a turning point in West Germany, in East Germany this dictum applied across the board much earlier, albeit not without ideological restrictions and peculiarities.

The day is highly symbolic, as it marked the end of the Nazi dictatorship, even if other days can justifiably be remembered at a local level. Of course, the actual liberation depended on the military situation; for Jena this would be April 12/13, when the city was gradually liberated by the troops of the 80th US Infantry Division, accompanied by sporadic fighting.

For many Germans, however, 1945 was not a day to rejoice. It is true that many had begun to distance themselves mentally from the war and dictatorship that they had willingly and enthusiastically supported for so long. Of course, this was not done out of moral insight into the criminal nature of both, but in view of the obvious defeat. In Jena, too, the last days of the war once again showed just how inhumane the regime really was and how willingly many, including ordinary Germans, participated in these crimes: there were the policemen who hanged two, possibly three, foreign forced laborers on what is now Pushkin Square immediately before the end of the war and who supported the SS when they drove thousands of concentration camp prisoners through the city on April 11 and murdered many of them. The same applies to a number of Jena citizens in the Volkssturm, who murder two forced laborers in Lobeda during the same period, but above all shoot two dozen concentration camp prisoners in Großlöbichau on 12 April, literally facing the end of the war.

These were not crimes committed by "typical" enforcers of the regime, such as SS guards or members of the Gestapo, but by ordinary Jena residents - such as Reichsbahn employees and Zeissians. Young people acted as helpers and informers until the very end.

On the other hand, there are of course Germans who can already recognize liberation in the end of the Nazi dictatorship in 1945. There are those who are in opposition to the Nazi regime. This remains the attitude of a minority, certainly, many of whom come from the environment of the banned parties SPD and KPD, but also representatives of the middle classes. The attack on the district leadership of the NSDAP at the end of March 1945 is a clear reminder of the existence of a Germany that was not committed to National Socialism or at least passively ducked away. And this is by no means the only act of resistance, as illegal leaflet campaigns and the like prove. They all had high hopes for a new beginning after the war, although their ideas differed widely.

And immediate liberation, liberation from directly experienced oppression, is for those who suffered under the repressive apparatus of the regime, for example due to racist or political persecution. After all, numerous Jena citizens were deported to prisons, concentration camps and - in the case of Jewish Germans in particular - ghettos and extermination camps.

Some people in Jena are only now able to emerge from the underground where they hid from the police, Volkssturm and Wehrmacht. This applies to a handful of former concentration camp prisoners from the more than 1000 inmates of the Jena subcamp of the Reichsbahnausbesserungswerk, which was located not far from here. These men had gone into hiding during the forced evacuation of the camp in the first week of April. And of course the same applies to the survivors of the death march of April 11, 1945, whose ears still echo with the shots fired by the SS.

But even beyond the concentration camp prisoners, at least around ten percent of the people living in Jena in 1945 were forcibly brought here or detained here and had to work as second or third-class citizens: the civilian forced laborers and prisoners of war.

During the war years, their camps and places of work covered the whole of Jena like a spider's web of exploitation, as there are camps from Löbstedt to Göschwitz, between Jena-Ost and Mühltal, and in all the villages that were later incorporated. In total, there may have been around 50 to 60 in the end. Like a metastasis, the use of forced labor seeped into every aspect of everyday life, as more than 300 places of deployment can be traced for the city on the Saale and surrounding villages. Not only those Jenens residents who directly employed forced laborers benefited directly from their presence, as everyday life in Germany, which functioned comparatively well until almost the end, could never have been maintained without them. This ranges from basic services and the supply of food to clearing rubble after air raids.

Between 1940 and 1945, around 14,000 civilian forced laborers and prisoners of war, men and women from almost all over Europe, are known to have worked in Jena, and by no means only in the armaments industry. Carl Zeiss, Jena and the Jena glassworks Schott & Genossen are naturally the most important places of employment, but they can be found in every industry, in every street.

In addition, there were a number of German-Jewish men, possibly several hundred, who were forcibly mobilized in autumn 1944 as so-called "Jüdische Mischlinge I. Grades" or "Jüdisch Versippte" for construction projects at the Jenaer Glaswerk and Carl Zeiss companies. One of their camps is perhaps a kilometer away from here as the crow flies, on the sports field in Jena-Ost.

Their fate varied from case to case, sometimes drastically. It fluctuated between relatively "normal" treatment, which lacked only one thing, albeit something crucial: freedom. But it could also be full of hunger and brutal mistreatment. Above all, it was always characterized by uncertainty and could take a turn for the worse at any time - which was particularly true for the Polish and Soviet forced labourers, who were less well fed, restricted in their freedom of movement, paid less and mistreated far more frequently.

They eagerly awaited liberation, the French in a camp in Hermann-Löns-Straße, who were forced to take down a white flag by threat of force of arms just before the Americans arrived, the German-Jewish men like 18-year-old Günther Hartmann from Augsburg in his barrack in Zeiss Camp III. Or like the "Eastern worker" Nina Koslowa, 19 years old at the time, a forced laborer at Carl Zeiss, Jena, for almost three years, who experienced help and solidarity from individual Germans in Camp VI in Mühltal as well as the brutal behavior of the camp staff, who also systematically withheld rations from the forced laborers.

For many, the liberation came as a surprise: Günther Hartmann was almost startled when a US soldier suddenly stood in front of him. But where the men and women still have strength, this is cause for outbursts of joy, and many still remember the American troops with gratitude decades later. For all those, it is rather April 12/13 that is associated with liberation, even if May 8 is of course more symbolically charged as the end of the war, the moment when one can really begin to tackle an "after".

The mortgages are admittedly high - for the foreign liberated as well as for the often unwillingly liberated Germans. Jena was damaged by bombing and fighting, but of course this also applies, often to a far greater extent, to the home towns of the forced laborers.

In memory, both dates remain somewhat ambivalent - the hopes for an (East) German democratic new beginning do not materialize, even if this is by no means an inevitable development. The liberation by the Americans is soon not really appreciated in the new dictatorship by Soviet grace, the German Democratic Republic, even if it cannot be equated with the Nazi regime, because it was "only" the Western Allies and not the Red Army.

At the same time, there are others who say that the end of the war was not a real liberation for East Germany in particular - in my opinion a very questionable view of things that carelessly levels out what the Nazi regime really meant.

So April 12/13 and May 8 remain a date that should and must be remembered, but at least as important is the before and after, remembering what we were liberated from and what a high price the Western Allies and especially the peoples of the Soviet Union had to pay to smash the dictatorship that was a catastrophe for Germany itself, but even more so for the rest of Europe.

At the same time, such remembrance should never forget what happened here - the victims in Jena, but also the deeds that were committed and approved here, and not infrequently by Jena citizens. May 8 will remain a day of reminder and warning, because there is one thing it must certainly not become - a day that stands for "liberation" from memory.